I just got back from the US after my first trip back. I have just a few thoughts, but a ton of feelings about being back. But before I go into that, I have to write about my trip back.

My flights alone totaled up to about 7 hours of airtime. But as soon as I landed into San Jose, it took me 14 hours on one bus before I got to where I needed to be. I landed at 11:49a and got to my destination at 4:00a. Yes, that was one brutal ride. I ended up meeting a couple of missionaries though on the way and we pretty much had a 14 hour conversation comparing travel stories and experiences. The couple does missions training for local pastors and helps the locals develop leadership skills and plant churches. What a great need they fill! It was a great time and I really appreciated what they were doing here in Panama. It made me glad to know that there are people who dedicate their whole lives to a worthwhile cause and trust God for their finances and provisions. Unfortunately, the next day, I had to wake up at 7, which left me with 3 hours of sleep and a very tired mind, body, and soul.

Madeline and Kyle’s wedding was beautiful. It was a smaller gathering (still at least 100 large), but really intimate. You could tell that almost everyone there was extremely close to the family and it meant a lot for both parties that they were getting married and that the guests could come. It made me think about my own life and my romantic life and wonder whether or not that sort of luck will happen to me someday. Madeline was the precious princess she I have always known; poised and elegant. Her dress was stunning and even as they gave the speech she told the world that the wedding was for them. Everything was perfect about the day and she embodied an excellence in internal beauty was was well displayed externally through everything from her dress to the colors on her eyes. I will definitely have to find someone who impresses me as much as she does someday in the future. Kyle was a little boy about to get the greatest present in the world he’d been looking forward to his whole life. On his face was an endless smile and his heart was clearly on his sleeve. He was of course, a super-stud and his golden tie and vest symbolized the heart-of-gold that he possesses. I can’t even explain the joy he must’ve felt, as he is, if you get to know him, a guy’s guy. Oh the things love can do to people – it’s great.

My lips and face almost cracked off while I was in Chicago due to the dry weather and being back in humid weather feels great. Everyone told me I brought Panama’s weather with me as the week before was freezing and horrible. I never thought I’d be so positive about heat and humidity (I’ve always loved the cold weather and was always against rain), but here I am enjoying the moisture in the air. It feels like I’m in a sauna that I can live in. My spirits are renewed and my energy has returned.

Much thanks to everyone who made my trip one of the best and most meaningful trips of my life. The conversations we had and the words we shared filled the spaces we were in with love, hope, and joy. I am grateful for each and everyone of you who opened you home to me, fed me a meal, took me out, or even offered to take me out – I wish I had more time to see everyone and eat a meal with everyone.

On faith, hope, and love.

The thought refuses to escape me. And “these three remain: faith, hope and love. Of these, love is the greatest.”

I can’t stop thinking about this phrase. I find myself completely enamored with the idea. The idea that love surpasses faith and hope is astonishing for several reasons. First of all, love is something of an exchange, a gift that we give, but something we must first receive. It requires that we truly see the other person for their worth, not just their status or what they can offer us. We must look within their lives, beyond the clothes, looks, job, beliefs, history, and habits in order to see that value within them. It is only then that we can move forward in loving someone. In order to give it, we must first have it. Love is both an emotional experience and a deliberate choice. But of all things, it is something that pushes the other into the center stage – where we can find beauty in sacrifice, empathy, service, and genuine care.

As I live from day to day, meditating on the Word of God through prayer, I am discovering new meaning to this passage. It would at first seem that faith is the most important thing. After all, everything apart from faith is sin and it is faith that we are called to have when it comes to Christ and his Kingdom. God calls us into a dependency of Him, something I believe is the perfect definition of faith. To have faith means to hold on to a promise or a commitment that someone made to you regardless of the circumstances that seem to swallow you whole. It is to believe that the other person is trustworthy and good to follow through. It isn’t just about motives, but about the realization of the motives. It is to understand what their intentions are and then to embrace them. To have faith means not to believe blindly, but receive with open hands the truth that was set forth and shared with us. It is trusting that their actions are congruent with their words. It is a security. The difficult thing is that we are constantly battling between the tensions of two sorts of faith in this era: the material faith and the saving faith.
Faith must be based on facts. It doesn’t have to be based on evidence. What is the difference? Facts are the truthful objective statements that exist whether or not we accept them. Fact: we are all broken beings in need of saving. Evidence is something that we can utilize to verify the facts. Most crime scenes provide evidence, but it usually requires time and dedication to find the clues to what happened. Evidence is sometimes deceiving and at times manipulating, but what we hope for in the search and discovery of evidence is that we will find hints or pieces to the puzzle of Truth (with a capital ‘T’). Evidence sometimes exists and at othertimes, is nowhere to be found. What really matters is whether or not we rely more on evidence or on facts. Its easy to depend on evidence because it is tangible, but as mentioned earlier, sometimes, evidence is nothing more than a red herring. We must not forget that faith is a dependency that must be based on facts and nothing more.

I have lived with a material faith for quite some time now. Living in America, you realize quickly that without financial stability, you can kiss your lifestyle goodbye. We rush to adjust our lives, values, and motivations around this economic system and try to get ahead by learning how to make all the right choices. We seek out experiences that will put us in the lead and find ourselves competing with people we’ve never met for jobs we really don’t want. Grades get in the way of intimate relationships when we enter high school and life zooms by without a unique memory. Every year looks like the last until you go to college and then those four years become a monochromatic sequence of time as well until you find your job. You hit the age of 21 and graduate, find a job and from then on, whether you stick with one job or try out 6 jobs until you find something you think might be worth spending your time on, you convince yourself that you are spending 9-14 hours a day in a worthwhile way. You make close enough friends to get by, but you don’t have the sort of relationships and friendships that you know your heart yearns for, has yearned for. Life is a blur, you get married to someone who seems to become your roommate where you do everything down the line and split the duties 50/50 instead of truly becoming one and living for each other. Love fades, but a kid comes along and even more years go on – the kids bring such joy. You continue to work so that you can fulfill your visiion from college and provide a healthy and happy lifestyle for your family. Your children go to a decent school in a decent neighborhood and have no exposure to the realities of the injustice in the global world, let alone the inner city. Your dependency is fully on your ability to perform, to earn money, and to maintain a level of living where your marital conflicts won’t become inflamed by the stress of limited finances. Life has become comfortable and secure, thanks to the economic and material system of the world.

Now, if you believe in God, you don’t forget his share and give him the 10-15% of your earnings as a tithing offering, but that’s ok. You make more than enough anyway. That extra 10-15% we give as an offering would either go to the church or added to your retirement account or the new Jet Ski you’ve been wanting to get.
It is so easy to fall into the traps of the world. I remember justifying to myself as I walked out the back door into my garage debating whether I should take the BMW or the Lexus that I was living a life of faith. Turning the car into the restaurant where I would eat a $100 meal that I wouldn’t hesitate to think twice about as each piece of meat melted in my mouth had become routine. Going out to shop at stores that you see the celebrities with the enormous publicity bank accounts was once something that made me think twice about, but no longer did it cross my mind when I spent $300 on a wallet that I would replace in a year. I worked for a lifestyle that most other people do as well and the normalcy of it all was blinding to me. I had no clue how my life of comfort was making me bitter. We must consider the object of our faith before all else, because the object of our faith will determine the values we hold and the values we hold will determine the outcome of our decisions and our lives.

Hope works the same way, except it doesn’t create a present addiction like faith does. Hope, is faith in the future. I have thought about what it means to hope and like faith, hope can become perverted. It is, like faith, also a beautiful and absolutely empowering concept. It gives us a confidence of the future and a comfort in the unknown. It gives us a sense of security that things will be all right, regardless of what the current outlook looks like. It gives us a light at the end of the tunnel. And like faith, if hope’s object isn’t hope-worthy, we will end up with a false hope or even a negative one. It will lead us down a path of decay as our minds will lose any sense of sanity and our souls will wither away. Hope is what makes the future meaningful.

Let’s face it. We don’t live in a perfect world, so if we continue to hope for imperfection, it doesn’t really give us much to be joyful or positive about. The hope that Christ offers in the Cross and the hope that all things will be redeemed to perfection is the greatest hope one can ask for, but just as we learn, it isn’t easy to hope in God. In fact, from the perspective of those who don’t know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the same God of Paul the Apostle and of John the Baptist, there is no hope in perfection, only in the idea that things might get better. Time becomes an issue to those who don’t have a hope in God because time is the only factor that keeps us from getting there. We try to do and perform to the best of our abilities to realize that hope within us, but we find that we cannot accomplish what we want or get to the point we are trying to arrive at. And if we do get there, we find that we need to hope in something else, because the human condition quickly gets used to it all and everything gets old quickly. Let’s face it, we can never be satisfied in something that isn’t infinitely quenching.

Here’s what is interesting about these three things. If we look into the passage, we find that the context of the chapter is love. 1 Corinthians 13 is the famous chapter that gives love attributes by which we can determine whether or not we live in our out of love. More interesting about the passage is that everything we experience as people to develop faith and hope will eventually cease when “the perfect comes.” As this perfection comes, we will find ourselves with a clearer vision of reality, that God loves us completely and without conditions, and in the knowledge of that, we learn to love God and others.

How good these three are. At times, I wonder if faith and hope were necessary to begin with. It appears that the first two are pointers to the third. Somehow, the fall of man created a need for us to live in faith and to have hope, as they are the means by which we can grow in love. But then again, we are held up and sustained by God in all things and there is much hope in that as well. It is a mystery to which I have yet to discover and tap into its depths. To love, we must depend on God to provide us with the capacity. To hope, we must understand that there is something greater, and that something greater gives us glimpses into God’s promise and provision for our future, and the knowledge of the reality to be received allots us with a love for God for His goodness, mercy, grace, and righteousness. How love endures through all the pain, hurt, and sin of the world, we will never know. Its an eternal mystery I am looking forward to spend eternity to find out.

My hope is that this makes sense.

One life. Making it count.